Posts tagged preschool

After last week’s harsh rebuke from her little friend, Hunter has been pretty reluctant to go to preschool. She’s been telling me she wants to stay home and that no one wants to play with her. I know that’s not true, but it still breaks my heart a bit when she says it.

Fortunately, she’s been okay once she actually gets there. Yesterday, one of the kids immediately came over to play with her (this girl’s a bit of a troublemaker and usually I secretly wish Hunter was playing with someone else, but yesterday I was glad to see her). Today she was doing her own thing when I left but she was fairly content.

As a bonus, Jorja came over looking to play and Hunter didn’t even notice her standing there. I know it’s incredibly petty and awful but I was glad she had to wait for Hunter to choose to play with her. Oh, I am terrible! I feel embarrassed to admit that, but there you have it. I hold grudges against four year olds.

Meanwhile, the preschool AGM was last night and what a boring event that was. Two hours of my life I will never get back. The worst part is that I somehow ended up on the management committee.

The committee requires four parent representatives and I was adamant I would not be one of them. I knew they’d be pressuring me to join because it’s hard for preschools to get parents who are willing to be involved, and by just showing up at the AGM I was setting myself up for the hard word. I had my excuse lined up and fully intended to be resolute about not nominating.

But I had a look at the other parents who had showed up (including one who hadn’t realised that an AGM wasn’t for children and one who raised a concern about the possibility of the preschoolers staging a violent intrusion…) and decided that I’d rather inconvenience myself than have the preschool overseen by fools.

The director assured me there wouldn’t be a lot of work involved, which is good news because I have no spare time whatever. She said I’d mostly be called on to sign cheques, which I could do when I was taking or picking up Hunter. There’s also a management committee meeting every six weeks and I hope they are quicker and less excruciatingly boring than the AGM – though I am not hopeful.

There are a couple of areas I’d like to work on. The preschool generated a measly $1,000 through fundraising last year and I think it could at least triple that. And they’re setting up a webpage so I thought I’d volunteer to help with the content – I confess mainly so that I can go all Grammar Police and correct errors before anything is published.

Hunter cried and cried and begged me not to go when I took her to preschool this morning. It wasn’t like yesterday where she cried a bit then was immediately fine.

This time, as I was leaving, she was screaming, “please, mummy, I don’t want you to go” and was bawling, red-faced and very distressed.

I hated leaving her like that, and I also hate that she forms habits of anti-socialness very quickly and lets them go gradually if at all. Which means she is probably going to do this every day now.

I wish I had some tactic to avoid this. I know that what would work best would be for a staff member to engage her in some task as soon as we arrive, and for me to leave before she thinks more about it. But with 40 children and four staff, it’s just not going to happen like that.

I’ll see how she goes over the next week or two and then I think I might have to talk with her teacher. It’s only happened twice and I suppose it’s still possible she could be fine again by next week, but knowing Hunter I think it’s more likely that last week’s easy start was the anomaly.

It’s a pity leigh can’t do drop off, because Hunter was always better about just getting on with her day if leigh took her to daycare, but preschool doesn’t start till 8 and Leigh has classes starting at 7.30 every day this year.

I knew it would happen, I just didn’t know when. It was always going to be a matter of time before Hugo decided sleeping through was silly and waking and screaming all night was much more fun.

The boy’s smart. He figured it out after just two nights.

Last night he woke three times, which doesn’t sound that bad except that they weren’t the wake, settle, back to sleep kind. They were the scream, scream, scream for 30 minutes kind.

I think he was so wakeful because his morning sleep was screwed up yesterday (see post about the three hour visit to the doctor…) and also because my boobs are very confused. When he slept through those nights they continued making the usual amount of milk, which turned out to be Far Too Much for those nights.

Yesterday things went way in the other direction and I really don’t feel like he had enough milk at any feed all day, so I am sure he went to bed hungry. I was hoping things might have evened out by this morning but it took me five minutes to express enough for his weetbix this morning (standing at the sink, hoping the neighbours weren’t watching).

Hopefully my supply will sort itself out by tonight or it could be a repeat of last night.

Hunter also woke last night, distraught and screaming. She clearly didn’t even know why she was awake, though, because when I rushed in and asked what was wrong she looked puzzled and said, “Um. I want…um. A drink”. She drank half a mouthful then I put her back to bed.

To top it off, she cried when I left her at preschool today. She was putting it on and just seeing how far she could push her luck so I wasn’t upset by it but I was a little annoyed. I could see her as I was leaving and she’d got on with playing in the sandpit before I was 10 metres away. I suspect she will do this most days from now on, as she often did at Family Daycare.